Serenity reigns at a Connecticut estate artfully updated by architect-owner Daniel Romualdez and made into a lush Arcadia by landscape designer Miranda Brooks. Hamish Bowles takes a tour.

The verdant hills and dales of northwest Connecticut dip and roll into landscapes dotted with clapboard farmsteads out of Currier and Ives prints. If it weren’t for the odd spec mansion blurring the romance, one might half expect to see a sled careening down a snowy hill bearing squealing children with furred bonnets and muffs, or a farmer scything golden corn on a late summer’s afternoon.

It was just such a bucolic setting that tempted architect and style-maker Daniel Romualdez to add a sturdy nineteenth-century Connecticut farmhouse, embowered in mountain greenery, to an enviable property portfolio that encompasses a soaring Charles Platt apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, a romantic cliff-top cottage in Montauk, and a modernist glass box in Beverly Hills.

But further real estate temptation lay in wait. Every time Romualdez had to run an errand into the local village, he admired a late-eighteenth-century stone house, once the town’s tavern and latterly the country refuge of the designer Bill Blass, a twinkling-eyed charmer with, as Vogue once put it, “a smile as broad as an Indiana prairie.”

“I was just curious, driving by this iconic house,” Romualdez recalls. “What was it like inside?” Naturally, with his encyclopedic knowledge of decorating statements both iconic and esoteric, Romualdez was familiar with many of the interior incarnations of a residence that Blass himself once laughingly told Vogue was “as overworked as I am.” In 1981, the magazine described it as “a house with integrity . . . and the best kind of American good looks.” As Blass’s friend and neighbor Oscar de la Renta noted a decade ago, Blass “achieved perfection in an extremely simple manner,” and in this, as in the effortless clothes he designed, which melded insouciantly chic practicality with silver-screen glamour, he was “totally American.”

After Blass died in 2002, Romualdez visited the fascinating house with Blass’s applauded interiors still intact. The designer’s spirit hung heavy in the air, and those much-documented rooms still cast a potent spell. “I thought it was ravishing,” says Romualdez. “I was really charmed by it. Even though it was very sparely decorated, all the beautiful objects gave it a lot of warmth. It was magical.”

But Romualdez wasn’t looking to buy, and he felt that the Blass legacy was too intimidating to take on: “I didn’t want to ride on his coattails.” Instead, a young investment banker bought the house and proceeded to lighten it to her own sunnier taste. When she moved on, a year later, Romualdez returned for a second look. “It wasn’t Bill Blass’s house anymore,” he remembers, and with the slate wiped cleaner he was finally ready to reimagine it in his own image. He decided to take the plunge.

“I loved it from the minute I moved in,” says ­Romualdez. “It was a place to look forward to.” A friend lent Romualdez some furniture, and he “camped out” while he contemplated how to update the property, focusing initially on the interiors.

Romualdez preserved the house’s patina, as Blass had done before him, opting not to refinish the timeworn broad maple floorboards or alter the harmonious scheme in the diminutive breakfast room (which Blass had used as a bar), with its eighteenth-century paneling picked out in enchanting tones of dusty-gray and rose-mauve milk paint.

He transformed the original tavern room, used by Blass as his dining room, into a sitting room. With its pickled pine–paneled walls and low ceiling it retains its evocative atmosphere. As Blass’s neighbor, friend, and art adviser Sir John Richardson puts it, “He had a real feeling for that American eighteenth-century look. He liked that it had been an inn and bought some marvelous bits of good eighteenth-century rustic furniture.” But while Romualdez has taken some aesthetic cues from the designer, he has also enlivened the Yankee austerity of the Blass scheme, filling this room with a commodious suzani-covered sofa and inviting wing chairs, and hanging the walls with enigmatic folk-artist portraits of scowling children who seem old and wise beyond their years. He also began collecting the honest-to-goodness antique American furniture that had so appealed to Blass. “I never, ever bought a Windsor chair in my life before!” says Romualdez, laughing. “It wasn’t exactly my aesthetic. It was a big learning curve, but now I’m obsessed. And I can’t believe that you can buy a beautiful, super–high quality eighteenth-century Windsor chair cheaper than a chair from Crate & Barrel or Ikea.”

As for the living room and the master bedroom, “the proportions are so different from what we’re used to today,” notes Romualdez. Both are configured as double parlors with twin chimneypieces and remain a challenge to furnish. “Bill had beautiful pieces of furniture,” remembers Oscar de la Renta of the living room, “but it was designed for no one to have a conversation in!” For Romualdez, in contrast, “it’s really about comfort”—not to mention the fact that he sees this house as an escape from the giddy social whirl. “I don’t entertain here. I didn’t want to have a third social life! And to be honest,” he adds, “there’s no check and balance: No one comes to the house and looks ashen when they walk in and see what’s there, so it’s gotten a bit too personal, to the point of quirky and eccentric!”

Case in point: A Christmas gift of a bravura example of the Victorian taxidermist’s art—a glazed case crowded with parrots and exotic birds—led Romualdez to assemble an assortment of nineteenth-century animals and some related art pieces from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries, from an exquisite Tiepolo drawing of a dromedary to a 2009 Richard Wathen painting of a surreal menagerie. A colobus monkey frolics under a sofa table, fox cubs gambol in the entrance hall, and a crested crane surveys the convivial furniturescapes in the almond-green living room—all giving the house the atmosphere of a Victorian-era gentleman explorer’s manse. Upstairs, Romualdez referenced Blass in the chocolate-brown walls of the sitting room but transformed the master bedroom into a chic jungle by hanging the walls and the four-poster bed in an eighteenth-century document Tree of Life cotton print.

In Blass’s day, a perpendicular barnlike wing of the house had been somewhat clumsily divided into kitchen and service quarters. Romualdez has largely reinstated the original soaring proportions and created an austere seventeenth-century-flavored dining room with a wall of floor-to-ceiling plate racks (inspired by those in Janet de Botton’s legendary Provençal mas) filled with a service playfully painted by his friend the artist Konstantin Kakanias with an array of fancy chickens of supposed royal provenance. In a light-filled sunroom, Romualdez has created another dining area with views that reveal his most significant intervention in the property’s evolution: its dramatically transformed setting.

For this, Romualdez turned to garden designer (and Vogue Contributing Editor) Miranda Brooks, whose work on both a modest London town-house garden (which she designed for her friend India Jane Birley) and the grounds of a storied 57-acre estate on Georgica Pond first alerted him to her singular talent. “I liked that her gardens were very structural,” he says. “There was strict architecture, but there was poetry in letting things go a little wild.”

When Brooks came to visit Romualdez’s Montauk house, she sketched a new scheme for its grounds on a napkin. Her plan blocked the troubling distant view of an architecturally assertive house and created a new approach that was both romantic and practical.

Romualdez was delighted with the transformations, and he turned to her once more for advice on the Connecticut manse. As a result, “the whole thing changed,” he says, and the house became as distinguished outside as in.

Blass had led a fairly solitary and retiring bachelor life in Connecticut. He planted thick-leafed shrubs to shield the windows from the road, cradling his home in protective shadow. “I don’t think the next-door neighbor and Blass liked each other,” adds Romualdez, “because they planted 70-foot-tall evergreen trees between each other. Two layers of them, blocking the sky!”

Blass created decking for a small swimming pool that was effectively a dipping pond for his beloved golden retrievers. “You looked out of the lovely sunroom, where all the southerly and westerly light was, and you gazed onto this rather strange wooden deck pool,” says Brooks, “and as Daniel was only there in the winter, he was basically looking at its cover.”

When Brooks presented Romualdez with the changes she’d conceived for the property, he was initially daunted. “Even as an architect I found it hard to envision how her design could happen,” he recalls, “and how it could change the landscape and still make it look like it had always been there.”

Fortune shone when, on the cusp of initiating work, Romualdez was able to acquire the house next door. Now Brooks could exponentially amplify her notion of opening up the house to its landscape and create a scheme that would unify the main house, this new guesthouse, and an existing converted barn that Blass had used for guests. The church across the road, with its towering steeple, became the focal point for the axis of the new gardens, subtly making it part of the ensemble.

Those lugubrious evergreens came down, the pool was removed, and Brooks’s strategy to “extend the terrace by lowering and deepening it, and create a lawn and a winter garden in what was a void” was implemented.

To further integrate the church into the landscape, Brooks realigned the house’s entrance drive with its facade, turning the drive into a humble “little grassy track.” She also took out the path to the front door that cut through downy masses of pachysandra, leveled its slope, and added handsome wide stone steps that mirror those leading to the church door. Walls of pleached lime discreetly shield the house from the roads.

Meanwhile, Romualdez was introduced to Nicholas Stauder, an ex-model who was initiating a landscape practice in the next village, and brought him onboard to create the stone terrace and massive supporting walls for the “lovely winter garden” that Brooks had conceived to be visible from the sunroom. “We didn’t buy a single block of stone,” says Romualdez proudly. “Everything was reused from the property—from the ground or from the woods. I guess it’s what they call ‘upcycling’!”

Neighbors who saw the massive earthworks—the process took ten months—wondered if Romualdez wasn’t building the Holland Tunnel.

But when all the work was done, “suddenly you saw the view for the first time!” Romualdez exults. His sunroom in particular commands a heart-stopping vista of the terraces and the majestic mountain beyond—not to mention the endless borrowed landscape of the farm next door. And the eye now leads from there to Romualdez’s new Greek Revival facade for the neighboring guesthouse, which replaces the clumsy recent additions to the original eighteenth-century building. This is now framed at the end of a hornbeam allée and set at an unexpectedly acute angle, evoking the stimulating perspectives of ancient Rome. Meanwhile, the road and garage to the right have been entirely screened from view by a loggia, shaded with a split-bamboo roof, that affords an alternative perspective of the upper terrace. This is thickly planted with sweet-scented rosemary, lavender, fig, strawberry, and clematis, as well as sea holly and tall grasses, and arranged with further seating areas that are strategically placed to offer different vistas of the newly revealed landscape—and the new formal garden on the lower lawn. With its geometric formations of box hedging and clipped beech “rooms,” this area is a beloved hide-and-seek location for Romualdez’s nephews and nieces (and for Brooks’s daughters, Poppy and Violette Grey, who is Romualdez’s goddaughter).

This overall formality evokes the classical idea of a landscape tamed by man that cedes to the natural wilderness beyond, where Brooks has placed magnolia and cherry trees (as well as the dogwood saplings that Deeda Blair used in the decor that she created for Romualdez’s fiftieth-birthday party) alongside the property’s original towering maple and locust trees. Her imaginative plantings have, as Romualdez notes, encouraged flights of butterflies and more birdsong. She has also cut meandering walks through the apple orchard and the woods, mown-through lanes of grass that is elsewhere allowed to grow tall and unkempt.

“Since I’m in Montauk in the summer, it was designed to be a winter garden,” Romualdez explains, “but because I love the place so much, I spend at least the beginning of the summer in Connecticut because it’s just so exciting to see things come to leaf, and flowers come out.”

With winter views in mind, Brooks selected the roses for their hips rather than their blooms, so the odd Schiaparelli-pink rose is inclined to ignite the soft gray, green, and mauve plantings—to her slight mortification.

“There is always something exciting to see,” says Romualdez. “There’s this nice contrast between the strict architecture, the strong axis, and the very strict bones, and the slightly scruffy plantings, with nothing prissy or precious. I don’t think Miranda’s ever absorbed anything from a suburb. You really feel like you’re in the country.”

On a recent visit with her husband, Oscar, Annette de la Renta exclaimed, “What an improvement!” The couple knew the house well in its former life. “So much air! It’s night and day.”

Romualdez describes the process of working with Brooks as a thrill. “And it gives me a lot of respect for landscape design because what they do is a lot harder than what architects or decorators do. Without a doubt. What we design is pretty static, but with gardens it changes every week. And at the same time, you have to know about architecture and engineering and drainage. It is not just a flower garden—this is complicated engineering. It was an education.”